Stimulate and adapt

When it comes to your physique or athletic performance progress isn’t linear. When you first start out progress is easy and everything works. However, as you approach the limits of what your body can do progress slows. Once you could put 10lbs on your squat a week but now you are happy with 10lbs in 4 months. The better you get, the fancier you have to be to make progress. This is why you see world records in many sports being slowly chipped away instead of blown away. Eventually your progress will look like a series of steps and plateaus. It is important to remember the basic idea of what you are trying to do in the gym.

Provide a stimulus sufficient to cause the organism to adapt.

As it adapts over time, it takes more stimulus to cause an adaptation. Therefore, what you did to get your squat to 225lbs isn’t going to get your squat to 600lbs. Or what got you to 10% fat won’t get you to 5%. The problem with this very basic formula is that people being creatures of habit tend to not change enough to give their body enough of a stimulus. This doesn’t mean working out more. It may mean fixing weaknesses you have been ignoring. It may mean doing less work and recovering more. Your workouts will be a series of pushes and backing off. Push your body to the edge. Back off and let it heal. Progress is like steps. Small goals that lead to bigger goals. The point is that it is OK to get stuck. It just isn’t ok to stay stuck.